Chocolate cake

I decided you cannot be a proper baker or kitchen wife (men included) without ever having made a real chocolate cake. This is definitely a real chocolate cake. A really delicious one at least. I’ve made chocolate cakes like Sacher Torte before, but I can’t really remember ever making a plain chocolate cake. So that’s what I did this time. Cherries were added in the middle to make it a bit more special and because cherries and chocolate cakes go together brilliantly. I made chocolate icing to go with it and added nougatine to cover up the fact that I forgot to sift the powdered sugar. And here’s what I ended up with. A proper mud bath. I added the sign and rubber duck for the effect.
For a cake which had a few mistakes from my part, quite a few, it didn’t look bad at all. It didn’t taste bad at all either. It tasted unexpectedly good actually!



Ingredients:
115 grams (unsalted) butter
115 grams plain flour
50 grams cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
6 eggs
200 grams sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. Melt the butter and set aside.
2. Mix the eggs and add the sugar spoon by spoon until you get a thick mixture that leaves a trail behind when you pull a spoon through it.
3. Add the vanilla and mix again.
4. Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder together and add it to the egg-mixture. Fold it in carefully.
5. Sprinkle the melted butter over the mixture and fold it in as well.
6. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a cake tin with grease-proof paper or butter it. Once the oven is preheated leave the cake in the oven for about 20-25 minutes.

For the chocolate icing, just melt around 2-3 chocolate bars and add 4-6 spoons of butter and 250 grams of powdered sugar. Make sure to SIFT the flour, unless of course you want the same effect as I had, after which I’d add something like nougatine or sprinkles as well.
Baking something that seems to be failing can be very frustrating, but as this cake proves: it doesn’t have to go wrong. With a bit of creativity you can turn anything in to a perfect cake!



Note: I realise I have a post on Chocolate cherry cake with fudge frosting, which is basically the same as this one. The cake however, is from a Sacher Torte recipe. Which still makes this the very first actual chocolate cake, I decided.